It remains a mystery to her, lost with her memory, even as her family awaits her release from a Delaware hospital.

“It’s been a relief to know how many good people there are out there who take care of someone who needs help,” said Hegg’s mother, Martha Wilson, referring to the months her missing daughter spent in Toronto suffering from amnesia. “I’m very grateful.”

Toronto police confirmed on Tuesday that the woman previously known only as Linda was indeed Linda Hegg, 56, of Newark, Del. She travelled to Canada by bus on Sept. 3, entering through the Peace Bridge crossing at Fort Erie with an expired U.S. passport.

Two days later, she walked into a downtown Toronto shelter with a tote bag filled with scraps of paper, a bottle of water, a map of Toronto bus routes and a wallet holding a $20 Canadian bill. She had no ID and no memory.

A North America-wide search that baffled authorities for more than three months ended last week when DNA tests confirmed Hegg’s identity. Det. Roger Caracciolo, who headed the investigation, broke the news to Hegg last Friday.

Linda’s Story is a fascinating investigation into the mysterious workings of the human brain. Available now at stardispatches.com

“When I told her who she was, she actually clapped her hands and said, ‘Yay, time to go home,’ ” Caracciolo told a press conference on Tuesday. And yet, “she doesn’t know where home is,” he added. Hegg hasn’t regained her memory.

American health-care workers drove her back to Newark on Friday.

“She asked where she had been and they told her, ‘Well, Linda, you were in Canada,’ ” Caracciolo said. “And she paused and said, ‘I like Canada. I’d like to visit there again.’ ”

Caracciolo revealed that Hegg was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1996. He said she may have experienced a traumatic incident that caused her to leave her apartment in Newark and lose her memory — a condition neuropsychologists call “fugue amnesia.”

Her mother says Hegg left the U.S. Navy — she was an officer stationed in Japan — in the mid-1980s, after a difficult experience involving a pregnancy. Her life then took a troubled turn.

“She was different when she came out of the service,” said Wilson, 80, in a phone interview from her home in Indianapolis, Ind. “She couldn’t seem to find a job and keep it.”

Hegg, who has a university degree in languages, returned to Japan for a year to teach English. Then she moved to Hawaii to do the same thing, but it didn’t work out. She soon called her mother for money to get back home.

Her parents divorced 30 years ago, and Hegg bounced around living with different members of her family — her mother, her father and a brother. She also jumped from one job to another — babysitting, cooking in a Japanese restaurant, and staffing a bookstore for one day.

“She would get very upset learning about a new job,” Wilson said. Her mother tried to get her help, taking her to mental-health clinics. But Hegg was “doing a great job at covering up” her troubles and nothing came of it, Wilson said.

In the early 1990s, while living with her mother in Delaware, Hegg suddenly left for Virginia Beach. There, she married a man she met in a homeless shelter. A month later, she called her mother for help, and her mother went to bring her back. Wilson described a traumatic incident resulting from the marriage.

Shortly after being diagnosed as schizophrenic, Hegg got an apartment in a Newark building run by the non-profit National Alliance for Mental Illness. Its 17 tenants pay 30 per cent of their federal disability benefits in rent.

With medication, she functioned well and made friends, said Wilson, who visited her daughter often. “She seemed to have a life that made her content. But her case worker said to me she’s much sicker than people realize and she will probably never have a job.”

Hegg was close to a man her neighbours describe as her boyfriend. They apparently broke up in 2007. Neighbours say she then stopped communicating with other tenants. The former boyfriend died of kidney failure a year later.

Wilson had moved to Indianapolis in 1999 but kept in touch with regular phone calls. Suddenly, beginning in early September, her calls went unanswered. In early November, Wilson couldn’t leave another message because the answering machine was full. That’s when she called police.

“I asked them to check to make sure she wasn’t in the apartment, because I had a picture in my mind of her lying there,” Wilson said.

On Nov. 5, Newark police issued a photo of Hegg and asked for the public’s help in finding her. Two days later, people using Internet sites for missing persons noted the similarity between Hegg’s picture and the pictures of Linda issued by Toronto police since early October.

Caracciolo sent Wilson a picture of her daughter in Toronto in mid-November. Wilson immediately identified her. Then she gave a DNA sample.

Caracciolo doesn’t know what kind of bus Hegg was on when she crossed into Canada. Nor does he know what happened to her during the two days she spent in Canada before walking into the Toronto shelter. What he’s certain of is this: “She presented an expired U.S. passport that got her into the country.”

Jean D’Amelio-Swyer, a spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency, said she did not know of Hegg’s case. She noted, however, that Americans don’t need a valid passport to enter Canada. A birth certificate or valid photo ID will do. It’s not known if Hegg had any of those.

Caracciolo made clear he supported the setting up of a central registry for missing people, adding it would greatly help investigations. He thanked the public for the “phenomenal” number of tips police received. Many came from families hoping Linda was their missing loved one.

Two families were taken to see Hegg during the investigation, only to discover it wasn’t the sister or daughter they were looking for. One of them — former Toronto resident Rae Allison — was found after the Star published her picture in an article about Hegg. Police spotted her in a Kingston shelter.

“I was astounded with how many missing people there are,” Caracciolo said.

Wilson has no idea why her daughter fled to Canada. It’s not clear whether Hegg will ever remember.

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